‘Time 100’ List Includes Artists David Hockney and Luchita Hurtado

Time magazine has revealed its new “Time 100” list, in tribute to the year’s 100 most influential people, and included in the latest edition are two artists: David Hockney and Luchita Hurtado.

Last year was an important one for Hockney, who set a new auction record for a living artist when his 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s in New York in November. The painting, one of the most celebrated works by the 81-year-old British artist, was previously owned by billionaire Joe Lewis. Last year the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also closed its iteration of a well-attended retrospective for Hockney, whose work has taken a variety of forms, including Pop-inspired canvases engaged with California culture and landscapes drawn using iPads.

“An artist alive with energy, David Hockney is sure to continue to find and develop new ways of expression,” Edwin Becker, the head of exhibitions at the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (where a Hockney show is now on view) wrote for Time. “His art encourages us to take a joyful and panoramic perspective of the world.”

The 98-year-old Hurtado, a maker of paintings that have offered female perspectives of women’s bodies and meditated on relationships between humans and nature for decades, wasn’t especially well-known until last year, when she was included in the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in L.A. biennial and proved one of its breakout stars. “I always worked,” Hurtado told ARTnews in a 2017 profile. “But I never showed my work.” She has since been added to the roster of Hauser & Wirth, one of the largest galleries in the world, and is now set to have her first full-career survey at the Serpentine Galleries in London this May.

“Her vision of the human body as a part of the world, not separate from nature, is more urgent today than ever,” Hans Ulrich Obrist, the curator of Hurtado’s Serpentine show, wrote in Time. “Luchita’s masterly oeuvre offers an extraordinary perspective that focuses attention on the edges of our bodies and the language that we use to bridge the gap between ourselves and others.”